What's New: AMD's Catalyst 10.2 & 10.3 Drivers
by Ryan Smith on February 16, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
10.2: Ultra Low Power State Confusion & Crossfire Eyefinity
When AMD was first briefing us on the 10.2 drivers, one of the first things they discussed was Ultra Low Power State (ULPS) support – this was probably a mistake. In our initial Radeon HD 5870 article covering the whole Evergreen architecture we discussed ULPS, albeit not under that name. ULPS was one of the many features AMD had briefed us about in September when they introduced the 5000 series, where ULPS allows AMD to power down the slave card(s) in a Crossfire configuration to a state even lower than idle. For the 5870/5970, this meant being able to reduce the slave(s) from 27W at idle to 20W under ULPS. This is only a 7W difference, but combined with other idle-efficient hardware it can become a notable difference. At the time it had been our understanding that this feature was enabled right out of the gate.
So imagine our confusion when at CES AMD is telling us that they are just enabling that feature for the entire 5000 series. Until that moment as far as we knew this feature was already enabled.
This started an almost immediate chain of confusion between ourselves and AMD. Terry Makedon – AMD’s Manager of Software Product Management – was giving the presentation and found himself at the end of an odd stare from us rather quickly. When we asked for clarification on this, he said that this feature was just finally going to be enabled in the mainstream Catalyst drivers, and that previously it had only been enabled for the 5970 in the launch drivers for that card. After expressing our displeasure on the issue, we quickly moved on due to time constraints.
The Radeon HD 5970: The card ULPS was practically made for
This brings us to February, where we started work on this article after wrapping up the Radeon HTPC investigation last week. Seeking further clarification on the issue and to once again express our displeasure with how this was handled, we sent an email to our favorite PR contact over at AMD, Evan Groenke. Evan has only been AMD’s PR frontman for hardware editors since the start of the year, and he’s been the guy largely responsible for helping us nail down all the issues we were seeing with the new Radeon 5000 series cards in HTPC use.
After sending that email early Friday morning, we got a phone call from Evan later that day… from the ski slopes. What was supposed to be a long weekend for him turned out to be a bit of a working weekend as he did what he could to dig in to the issue and to find a better explanation for us. Thanks to him we have a solid explanation on what’s going on and why our earlier tests were not as compromised as we once thought they were.
The key issue for AMD is that they did not consider the software side of ULPS to be ready for public use when the 5000 series launched, so it was not enabled in the Catalyst drivers at the time. ULPS was then enabled for the 5970 launch, where AMD was confident it was going to work correctly under the very limited conditions encountered by a single-card dual-GPU setup. But this was only enabled for the launch driver for the 5970 – it was never enabled in the mainline Catalyst drivers.
The issue for us, and why we were initially so displeased, was that it had never been communicated to us that ULPS wasn’t enabled from the beginning. We thought that it was enabled, AMD thought we knew that it wasn’t. So when we did our testing of the 5700, 5800, and 5900 series, we based all of our data on the idea that this feature was enabled, when in retrospect it wasn’t. Worse, it was enabled on the drivers we used to test the 5970 but not the 5870/5850, so our results would have the 5970 consuming less power at idle than what a real user would get if they used the mainline Catalyst drivers. This makes the results invalid, and was the source of our concerns.
Our original 5970 results
All of this was finally clarified when Evan was able to tell us two things: that the driver set we used to test the 5970 had been posted as a hotfix driver for the 5970 launch, and that it wasn’t the only driver with ULPS enabled. The former is of particular importance since coming from CES our interpretation had been that ULPS was not enabled on any public driver build, when in fact it just hadn’t been enabled on any mainline driver build – it had in fact been available in public hotfixes such as the 5970 launch driver. The latter is important because it was an undocumented feature of the 9.12 hotfix, which as we explained earlier is the precursor to much of what’s in the 10.2 driver being released today. So if you used the 9.12 hotfix, then you’ve already been enjoying ULPS on your 5000-series Crossfire setups.
With that in mind, here’s what the issue ultimately boils down to: Unless you were using the 5970 launch driver or the 9.12 hotfix, you have not been enjoying the benefit of ULPS. Specifically, unless you have used those drivers your idle power usage on the 5970 would have been around 7W higher than what we found in our initial 5970 review. It’s only now with today’s 10.2 driver that this is finally being enabled for customers using the mainline driver. If that’s you, then the 10.2 drivers should reduce your idle power usage some.
To settle this point, here we have a re-test of the 5970 using the 10.1 Catalyst drivers, and the 10.3 beta drivers AMD has provided us.
Our new 5970 results. Note: This is a different test setup than for our original results
The end result: a difference of 8W, out of 170W, meaning enabling it reduces idle power usage by around 5% on our overclocked Core i7 920 setup.
Moving on from ULPS, we have Crossfire Eyefinity, one of the other features that was previously exposed in the 9.12 hotfix driver. Much like ULPS, this feature was originally only enabled for the 5970 while AMD worked out the kinks in the technology. Since the 5970’s launch this feature has made a great deal of progress – it’s no longer a whitelist feature that only works on certain games, but rather it’s a blacklist feature where AMD only disables it on games where there are known issues.
We strongly suspect that anyone that had a vested interest in a Crossfire Eyefinity setup with a pair of 5800/5700 series cards already is on the 9.12 hotfix, but nevertheless this brings Crossfire Eyefinity in to the mainline drivers for everyone else.
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anactoraaron - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
yeah "fast and versitile control panel" that doesn't include any overclocking option. And why is that again? Oh yeah, Nvidia cards these days (provided you acutally are getting "new" technology and not a rebrand) run HOT. And looking at load temps/power usage from any other article on this fine website will show proof of that. OC with them with no water cool and you are asking for trouble. And don't even get me started with all of the issues with nTune... I lost count of all the times nTune crashed my pc with my 8800...leexgx - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
stop useing caps (please press report post to remove users post like this)bim27142 - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
man, chill... if you don't want CCC, then just download the drive only and then get yourself some other softwares (say ATI Tray Tools perhaps?)cheinonen - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
I'm just glad they will finally have monthly drivers for my wife's laptop so I'm not at the mercy of HP deciding they want to support it. Her machine can't do full screen Flash with the CPU only, and HP has refused to release an updated driver with Flash 10.1 acceleration support, even though they could, so hopefully by next month she'll be watching Hulu on her laptop full screen.RaynorWolfcastle - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
While all this is great, I think ATI should instead focus on fixing the grey screen bug that shows up on Win7 x64. My 5770 is all but unusable because it crashes every 30 mins while I'm browsing the web. Unfortunately, this issue is not a bad card but a widespread issue with the current drivers that affects several brands and models. Google "grey screen of death" to see what I mean.So AMD, how about we start with the basics, and get your cards to work without crashing instead of these new features?
heymrdj - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
Now if only drivers would get rid of this random problem..FXi - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
If AMD manages to get mobile drivers out this could be doom for Nvidia in the mobile space.DX11 (judging by Nvidia's silence on the mobile DX11 topic) is apparently not within Nvidia's capability this year. It's not even on the roadmaps. Fermi is big and hot, not mobile. Now mind you, AMD has been "talking" mobile drivers for a year and has yet to deliver, so there is that weakness to this. But if AMD is DX11, and the only mobile DX11 solution, with drivers on top of that, Nvidia can wave bye bye to all their mid to high end GPU solutions for laptops.
To top it off AMD's mobile solutions are all 40nm, so they are lower power than Nvidia's high end mobile solutions.
If Nvidia has a flag to wave, they had better wave it soon. The DX11 mobile parts are here. Drivers come in 30 days. And the marketshare shift comes after that. That spells doom and gloom for Nvidia's sales.
Ramon Zarat - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
Very nice article.Despite the fact that I recognize ATI tremendous progression on the driver front in recent years, in many respects, they are unfortunately still behind Nvidia.
On the other hand, they definitively have the current hardware market lead and momentum. And to be honest, their drivers have not been this close to Nvidia, ever. So close, but still so far at he same time...
To really take the longterm control of the GPU market, they must pull all the stops and take the lead from Nvidia within the next 10 months. Once you have missed this windows of opportunity, it's too late. ATI have proven they can execute flawlessly on the hardware level with the impressive roll-out of the 5000 series. Now they need to do the same of the software side of the equation.
In the mid-term, GPGPU, or more to the point OpenCL, will become much more than just the niche market CUDA is right now, more or less confined to the role of marking bragging rights and branding technological statement. It will soon become, if not already the case, a major purchasing decision factor.
Just like Adobe flash, despite currently being based on Microsoft proprietary DXVA2, more and more apps will become GPGPU aware. Logically, sooner than later, every applications will take advantage of it simply because of the decisive market edge it will provide. Anything that don't will instantly become obsolete. That mean all and every applications requiring more juice than Microsoft calculator or Solitaire...
2011 is shaping up to be the Opencl year and as such, a significant turning point in the overall computing balance of power. ATI can't afford to miss that boat and must in fact imperatively be ahead of that game. That's crucial for them as for the AMD's branch fusion platform. Integration and convergence will be more prevalent than ever.
There are much more things to do than just OpenCl, but in my opinion, that should be priority number one. The fact they are so behind in that department is obvious if you compare Stream with Cuda market penetration, drivers maturity, OpenCL SDK and their overall strategy. Add to this the need to be ahead 10 months from now means only one thing: MAJOR R&D spending and hire A LOT of software engineers!
Anything less would qualify as a monumental missed opportunity as such fundamental transitive market vectors (GPGPU and OpenCL) are a very rare occurrence in the computing technological evolution cycle. It's not everyday that a technology goes from a totally exclusive vertical gaming centric focus to a complete horizontal, general purpose capable device delivering, in a variety of applications, 30 to 100% processing speed acceleration, and in some situations a lot more than that compare to CPU alone!
In fact, I can't even remember anything close the near-paradigm of the current situation since the inception of electronic digital computing device with the introduction, in 1937, of the Atanasoff–Berry computer. In all that time, we have witnessed many incredible innovations and actual real paradigms shift, but as far as I know, nothing like this transmutation of an existing technology. It's like the GPU went from the confine of its larva state to finally hatch and achieve its full GPGPU potential! OpenCL is the mean to open that floodgate. That's why it's so important ATI make this happen, fast.
Ramon
R3MF - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
I want it AMD, and it want it installed by default in the catalyst driver.tntomek - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
The 5000 series mobile GPU adoption is seriously hurting. Dell has nothing, HP only has the envy which is great if only if were available in Canada/UK for less than $2199And what really is the point of i5 if I can't switch and run on Intel graphics when I'm working in Word, doesn't have to be pretty and automatic just give me the option if even via reboot or logout. No need for slow notebook and sweaty palms in 2010.